The philosophies of men mingled with the philosophies of women.

Facts or Feelings — Just what is truth?

This final post in a trilogy on discerning truth recounts a poignant example of memory distortion that has bittersweet connotations for our family now that my husband has passed on.

Genuine tragedies have occurred when false memories have resulted in false accusations. Fortunately, most false memories are relatively harmless, and easily corrected when brought to light. Our family has a “false memory” story, which we laughingly bring up whenever we doubt one another’s recollection of an event.

During a time before everyone had cell phones, when we were living in a suburb of Baltimore, our seventeen year-old daughter J called from a friend’s house to ask for an extension of her curfew. My late husband, David, was in Europe on business, and as I listened to J’s request, I prayed I would make a decision that he would agree with.

J explained that, because she had been unexpectedly asked to close the store where she worked part time as a cashier, she had left the store much later than usual. She then got lost while trying to find the home of the friend who was hosting the party. She finally arrived about 15 minutes before she was due home. After considering the circumstances, I felt prompted to give her permission to stay out later.

When J returned home, she explained how grateful she was for the curfew extension. Her friends (most of them not LDS) had encouraged her to make up a story about a flat tire or something similar. She had told them that she never lied to her parents, and that they were generally understanding and reasonable about modifying the rules in special circumstances. The fact that she obtained a curfew extension when telling the truth, greatly surprised and impressed them. I was very thankful that I had followed my spiritual impression to grant J’s request.

Soon after this experience, David phoned me from Europe, and I explained in great detail the extenuating circumstances, hoping he would agree that I had done the right thing. He was very impressed with the positive outcome of this event, and the details stuck in his mind. Some years later, when David was speaking of this experience to some friends. I was shocked to hear him tell it as though he had been the one who had spoken with our daughter. I didn’t interrupt him at the time, but I later reminded him that J had spoken with me, since he was in Europe at the time.

David didn’t believe me. Apparently I had recounted the experience to him in such vivid detail, including my emotional and spiritual feelings about what had happened, that he had internalized it completely. Thus, many years later, when recalling the event, he was fully convinced that he was the one who had granted the curfew extension resulting in J’s relief and justification in the presence of her skeptical peers. I was incredulous, thinking that he must be joking (a pastime he frequently engaged in) when he continued to insist he had answered the phone that night David was so confident and forceful in his assertions that I eventually began to wonder if I had fallen prey to early onset Alzeheimer’s.

Fortunately for me, some time later, when our daughter confirmed my version of the experience, he graciously conceded that he had obviously been mistaken.

Once there was a second witness, my husband had to admit intellectually that he must have remembered the event incorrectly. However, judging from stray comments he made about the incident over the succeeding years, I suspect that false memory may have remained in his mind until the day he died as a strikingly clear and vivid record–of something that never happened.

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32 thoughts on “Facts or Feelings — Just what is truth?”

When you consider that much of our church history is based on recollections years after the fact, you get suspicious…Kirtland temple dedication, Brigham’s transfiguration, priesthood restoration. Sigh.

What the scientists are now learning about memory is very counter-intuitive. It turns out that how vivid a memory is is not a good indicator of how reliable a memory is. Also, our memories change each time we recall them without our knowing it. This has pretty significant implications for the judicial system. In daily life, I think it should help us be a little more cautious about our memories. Brian Williams was probably a victim of false memory of the kind your husband experienced, rather than the unethical fraudster he is being made out to be.

I wonder sometimes about some of the revelations Joseph Smith says he received. Especially suspect, at least in my mind, is the visitation of an angel threatening him with a sword if he did not practice polygamy. I can’t recall of any other time when angels have threatened someone with an earthly weapon. Perhaps someone else out there is more knowledgeable and scholarly than I am and may know the answer to this. Currently, I am suspicious of it’s authenticity. I wonder, again in my mind, if polygamy was something he thought would be a great idea and convinced himself that an angel commanded him to do it.

I can think of two instances from church history where, in my view, a spiritual experience was born out of false memories. The first is the transformation of Brigham Young into Joseph Smith. There is, I believe, a Dialogue article that goes through how there are no contemporary journal accounts of the transformation, but that a few years later people began remembering seeing Joseph’s mantel descend on Brigham and he looked or sounded like Joseph. Even people who were not present in Nauvoo later “remembered” the transformation.

The second is the Founding Fathers appearing to Wilford Woodruff. In his daily journal I believe it was either a dream or a thought he had. But later it turned into an actual visitation.

I think for the angel with a sword commanding Joseph to practice polygamy there just isn’t a good way to determine if that could be a false memory. That’s true of a lot of spiritual experiences. If they’re not written down immediately, it’s almost impossible to say if a later recollection is accurate or not. The quest for the historical Jesus is an attempt to determine what in the New Testament is embellishment, what is myth, what is false or manipulated memory, and what is true. In that case you’re dealing with texts written decades after the fact.

The instructor alluded to and had read the scripture regarding the easier-than-a-camel-though-the-eye-of-the-needle analogy. The instructor then asked what class members thought that meant. Of course, someone brought up the camel-needing-to-be unloaded-and-kneel-to-get-through-the-Jerusalem-gate interpretation.

The instructor then said scholarship shows that interpretation arose many hundreds of years after the fact and said that there was no convincing evidence of there ever being such a gate in the Jerusalem wall to support it. He then asked what we thought the analogy meant.

There was a long pause where no one said anything and I finally said very silently. “Truth is a matter of the imagination.” Without attribution. The class member who had brought up the gate interpretation started deriding what I’d said as though I’d said truth is imagination.

I reminded him of what I had actually said, thinking how ironic that was. But there followed suddenly very vocal testimonies from various members that truth didn’t have anything at all to do with imagination. Essentially, I know the gospel is true and there is nothing imaginary about it.

Imagination has everything to do with truth. The posting illustrates an episode of how memory works. In the moment we act, we usually use imagination to decide how to. The future perhaps uses the imagination the most.

Hawkgrrrl. I totally forgot about that incident. Like many impression filled experiences we have had throughout the years, Mom has consistently said I was not there when I was indeed there. I can think of several.

Memory and spiritual feelings, and the interpretation of those feelings, are fascinating to me. Something that really bothers me, though, is that many people seem so quick to dismiss someone else’s feelings as not real, not true, or improperly interpreted, but refuse to scrutinize their own feelings.

For example, when I was an active member, if a Baptist told me that they prayed and god told them that their church was the only true church, I couldn’t believe them. If I did, then that would mean my testimony was false. So, I would think they didn’t feel what they said they felt, or they did feel something, but it didn’t mean what they thought it meant. Perhaps a better example: if someone told me god told them to kill their child, I wouldn’t believe that god told them that. I would think: this person is crazy or this person is lying or this person is badly misinterpreting a feeling they had. We all dismiss the feelings and claims of others all the time. You have to, or you would believe so many contradictions that it would be hard to retain any logical beliefs. But it seems that very few of us are willing to apply that scrutiny to ourselves. I think most people are very skeptical of others, which is a good thing, but not skeptical enough, or not skeptical at all, regarding their own feelings. When I had the realization that I should be willing to scrutinize my own feelings, at least a little bit, suddenly things that seemed confusing and contradictory were crystal clear. I think we all need to be willing to admit that a memory, or a spiritual experience, could be in reality very different from what we think it is.

I was talking to my mum the other day about the unreliability of memory. She was saying there are events she remembers as having taken place in one house when she knows for sure that can’t be right because she wasn’t living there then.

A long time ago now, I was stopped in the street to answer some survey questions. Ostensibly the survey was about whether I had seen a particular advertisement on TV. I was briefly visiting my parents, didn’t have a TV myself, and hadn’t been visiting long enough to have seen it (it was have been a very local Christmas-themed ad for a local shopping centre). I said I hadn’t seen it. Anyway, the pattern was, they’d ask a few more questions about shopping and which stores I would use in the shopping centre, and then return to asking about the ad, each time adding more detail about the ad. By the end of the survey, I could pretty much picture the ad, and if I hadn’t known I couldn’t possibly have seen it, I would have believed that I had in fact seen it. Which left me wondering whether the survey was indeed about a TV ad at all…

Happiness is truth. When I joined the church (about the time the dinosaurs roamed the earth), Paul Dunn was a big reason. His “facts” gave me great feelings. As time went on, I relied less on feelings for truth as it relates to the church. Sometimes, I wish I were wired differently but I am not. I found out I could not be happy with an alarm going off in my head 24/7.

Greg, first comment, should have also included the New Testament, especially the Gospels where very old memories are the source of quotes and actions of Christ. Most scholars have concluded that the earliest writings of these “scriptures” are from about 70 AD–40 years after the facts. Not to mention all the translations and transcriptions between then and the KJV, for example.

The issue/problem with feelings vs. truth goes much deeper than simple memory accuracy: Regardless of the heartfelt sincerity of the many testimonies I hear about how God has revealed this or that is true (and the immense value such belief/faith can have in people’s lives), my working theory is that such feelings are self-created and self-imposed. Our brain/psychology, whatever, can convince us of things we want strongly to believe to be true.

My working theory does not conclude that God is not there. However, for example, the many testimonies of God helping people find their car keys (or whatever), while He chooses not to “respond” to real need, is so logically inconsistent (to vastly oversimplify) that I am led to conclude that He is precluded from being much involved in our lives–for we are (nearly completely) “agents unto ourselves.”

MH, Thank you for the reference to Balaam and his donkey. I appreciate it. I know there have been destroying angels but was not familiar with them actually threatening anyone with a sword. You answered my question. Thank You.

Memory also has a cultural element. In societies with easy access to the written word, good memory isn’t necessary. In ancient societies messengers were required to repeat long communications verbatim. Many OT prophecies were likely written from memory (not even addressing the likely oral history component of the Torah). Greek epics were recited from memory. Even in Maori culture, people recite from memory countless generations of ancestry. The human mind is capable of memorizing and regurgitating an incredible amount of detail.

Unfortunately, in a culture where photographs and documentation are available at the tip of our fingers, we don’t need to rely on human memory. We don’t cultivate attention to detail – it’s unnecessary. We also value individual feelings. If something “feels” true, then it is true in a major sense. I think these factors play a role in why memory is so faulty in Western societies.

This is a great website. It is helping to fill the needs of those who read and post here. The idea that the permas pander to the crowd is really funny. If things get too negative, change the channel. I disagree with almost everything you say, Jared, but I like reading what you have to say. If for no other reason, it makes me mad. 🙂

I read most of the faithful post. Think about them and comment if I feel I can add to the discussion.

I commented on Bill Reel’s recent post. I thought it was a home run.

I learn a lot from MH.

I enjoy reading Hawkgrrrl’s post.

I could pay more compliments, but I’ve got to get back to work.

My comment above is expressed as a hope. I hope the movers and shakers at W&T will endeavor to balance the teeter-tooter a little more towards faith. If you agree with me, say so. If not, that’s OK too. Maybe you could explain why you disagree.

Well, for one, I see this post as completely neutral on the question of faith. This post is about how people think and how memory works, which is IMO an interesting topic.

I don’t see there being a faith-related balancing act required in terms of content. Posts should be interesting based on their topics and the author’s ability to write about something that includes a newly fresh or personal viewpoint. I really don’t care what that viewpoint is. I’m not sure if you are suggesting we need more posts on the topic of faith or if you feel we need more “faithful” posts, ones that bolster your view of what faith entails. Maybe you can clarify. Or hey, write a post, and we’ll happily publish it!

The commenters are free to bring the discussion forward in whatever way their viewpoint will, which is why we are more interested in teeing up discussions here rather than just stand alone essays. I find some topics more interesting than “faith,” such as psychology, sociology, current events, and humor. Everyone likes what they like.

Please don’t interpret my “alternate voice” as being harsh and unkind. My intent is to help build faith.

Nowadays, there is so much that chips away at faith in God that I feel a responsibility to stand up for faith. I try to do so wisely and kindly.

Regarding this post, as I read it, I thought it added to the chorus of voices that are saying that we can’t trust our feelings, that what church leaders are teaching about impressions, spiritual experiences, and promptings of the Holy Ghost is wildly unreasonable, and needs to be exposed for what it is, the workings of our minds and imaginations.

It has been very interesting, although at times rather disconcerting, to finally read all the comments on my guest post. (A visit from a close relative kept me from getting back to this site until now.)
Thank you, Stephen M, for clarifying where I stand on the “faith” continuum regarding the LDS church. I also agree with your comment #5, that secondary sources are often suspect, and with your comment #24, that “memory is about learning and not facts.”
Jared (#29), this post was the third in a trilogy on the subject of truth, and if you read my preceding two posts you will understand that my concerns were primarily with the dangers of coming to doubt or reject the truthfulness of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ because of things we may read that appear to contradict what we thought about certain aspects of Church history. My personal experience, and my study of the phenomenon of false memories, leads me to be more inclined to “doubt the doubters” than to join them.